Shailene Woodley was two days into a new job at American Apparel when she got the call from her agent: meet Sideways director Alexander Payne for a coffee. After a bit of agonising ("It was my second day of work … I didn't want to let the store down"), she faked flu and got on the plane from New York to Los Angeles. Three months later, Woodley was filming The Descendants in Hawaii with George Clooney.
From T-shirt folder to A-lister in super-fast time? Well, not quite. At 20, Woodley is a veteran. Acting since the age of six, she is the star of long running after-school drama, The Secret Life of the American Teenager. So what exactly was she doing working in a clothes shop? Taking a "hiatus", it turns out. When the TV show gave her a few months off in late 2009 she moved to New York with her then-boyfriend: "I thought it would be fun to experience something new, live in a different city. I applied to work everywhere from grocery stores to clothing shops. And it was way fun."
And here's the thing that's ever so slightly freaky about the young Hollywood class of 2012: they're unflaggingly well-adjusted. It's as if they've learned all the hard-knocks lessons of wild child actors of yesteryear. There's not a whiff of scandal, no suggestion of extracurricular shenanigans. They save brattishness for the camera. In The Descendants, Woodley plays troubled tearaway daughter to Clooney's lawyer – her mum is in a coma after a speedboat accident. The actor had "butterflies" reading the script, which falls somewhere between heartwarmer and black comedy: "It was very real, and raw and messy." Her scenes are the heart of the film: in one she has to tell her dad that her mum (still in the coma) has been unfaithful. The New York Times praised her for "one of the toughest, smartest, most credible adolescent performances in recent memory".
Payne has called her "the cat's pyjamas"; he knew two minutes into the audition that she was right for the part. Her first impressions were less favourable. She had watched Sideways with her parents when she was 14. "I didn't think it was funny at all," she confesses. "I didn't understand the humour." She gave it a second viewing after getting the part – "obviously, it's brilliant". And she's duly gushy about Clooney: "You'll never meet a nicer human being in your life. He is the most generous, down-to-earth, giving man I've ever met."
Looking ahead, Woodley says she'd like to take on "darker" roles and wouldn't mind a bit if her career looked like Natalie Portman's: "I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon. I'm not going to do another film until I get butterflies again."
